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June 2018

“There is not a moment to lose” – I don’t know if you have ever read any of the Aubrey-Maturin books by the late Patrick O’Brian, set at the turn of the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries and describing life in the Royal Navy. Even if you have only flicked through one of the books, you will probably have picked up an almost constant sense of urgency (a realistic representation of what pervaded the Navy at that time) in the books, much to the annoyance of the decidedly un-Navy-like Dr Maturin!

Considering the modern pace of change I think this sentiment is truer today, especially in scientific fields, than it has ever been before. Certainly from my perspective there is an urgency to try and push forward the state-of-the-art in HPC and share it, before other people’s activities supersede my work. However, I think this same sense of urgency also applies to other, non-technical, aspects of our community. Diversity is a prime example here and, whilst there are some excellent initiatives being adopted by the likes of the SuperComputing (SC) and ISC conferences, we still have a long way to go.

Guest blogger Matko Mužević, a PhD student from Croatia, is a remote visitor to EPCC through the HPC-Europa3 programme. He is using ARCHER while based at Cardiff University.

I'm working and doing my research at the Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek. My thesis deals with ultra-thin monoelemental materials and their properties. One of the most important properties to consider for the application of such materials are their optical properties.

Fourteen-year-old Alex Curtis joined us for a week of work experience in May, building a Wee Archlet (a Raspberry Pi cluster) and visiting the Advanced Computing Facility where ARCHER is hosted.

For my task I had the job of testing the instructions for the ‘Wee Archlet’ (Raspberry Pi cluster) to make sure it was understandable for people of my age. EPCC hopes that teenagers a bit older than me can open up one of their kits and build their own Wee Archlet. To create the Wee Archlet we had to make the Raspberry Pis to talk to each other in order to share out the resources from each Pi to work together as one big cluster.

Spyros Nita is an MSc student on our High Performance Computing with Data Science programme. He tells us about TeamEPCC, which will be competing in the Student Cluster Competition at ISC High Performance 2018.

Summer is on its way, and with it the annual International Supercomputing Conference (ISC). One of the three most important annual HPC events in the world, ISC focuses on the development of HPC, its scientific applications and its adoption into commercial environments. An important part of this event is the Student Cluster Competition (SCC), where teams representing twelve international universities meet to compete with each other. The University of Edinburgh is represented by TeamEPCC, four students currently enrolled in the MSc in High Performance Computing or MSc in High Performance Computing with Data Science.